September 05
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“We have lost such a lot of ice this year that we have basically skipped about three years and stepped into the future,” Huss says in an interview. “This was the first year when I was really worried about the summer because the melting was so strong. I really sensed that my glaciers would lose a lot of mass.”
Glaciers are a much-discussed, and sometimes anthropomorphized, indicator of climate change. Their demise is also becoming deadly for mankind. This summer’s high temperatures in Europe led to a glacial ice shelf collapse in Italy that ended the life of 11 hikers. The Himalayas are also losing ice at an accelerated rate. This year’s record breaking glacial melt in Asia’s iconic mountain range has added to floods that have devastated Pakistan, submerging farmlands and cities and killing more than 1,000 people.
With so much at stake, I began to wonder what the experience of this year has been like for the scientists that are now having to announce the grim realities of their findings, year after year. The summer has been hectic.
After shutting down the Corvatsch operation on a Thursday, the wiry 42-year-old Huss was running up to the Claridenfirn glacier in the Glarus Alps on Sunday to ensure that data measurements stretching back 108 years didn’t end up in slush sliding down the mountain.
By last Tuesday, which is when I tracked him down, Huss was in the middle of the Glacier de la Plaine Morte above the Rhone Valley. His team from ETH Zurich and the University of Fribourg were having a little trouble with their boring equipment.
After finding a more cooperative spot, the team drove the bolted-together sections of a Kovacs drill into the ice eight meters down. A measuring pole of the same length was then inserted, in the hope that that will be enough to keep pace with the thawing of the ice sheet for another year.
Four more of these operations on the glacier formed a day’s work for the team, who are experiencing the massive changes in their field with a mix of intellectual excitement and emotional distress.
“It hurts, in my heart as a mountaineer, as a mountain lover, but as a scientist it’s really an interesting time,” Huss says.
GLAMOS maintains data on about 180 of Switzerland’s 1,400 glaciers. Despite the fame of many of these Alpine features as ski destinations or attractions in their own right, Switzerland has only a tiny fraction of the world’s glaciers, the vast majority of which are in the polar regions.
Nevertheless, Switzerland has become a front-row seat for scientists watching the unfolding effects of climate change on mountain ecosystems. Higher latitudes are experiencing a greater-than-the-global-mean level of warming than those closer to the equator. Switzerland, which sits farther north than most of the continental US, has seen an average 2 degrees Celsius increase over the past 150 years, compared with the overall 1 degree mean rise.
The melting Alpine glaciers have uncovered the bodies of long-lost mountaineers, the wreckage of a light aircraft that came down in 1968, along with other revelations that have made front page news.
The data inputs from glacier science are also vital to predicting river flow and the risk of floods far below the mountain. The accelerated glacial melt is replenishing the reservoirs of Switzerland’s hydroelectric dams despite a historic lack of rainfall, potentially helping it avoid the soaring power prices expected to squeeze much of Europe this winter.
At the Glacier de la Plaine Morte, a 5-kilometer-long sheet that sits, immobile, in a trough made by mountain peaks, the shrinkage is visible on a vast scale. A decade ago, the surface of the ice was as much as 20 meters higher. In recent years, small outcrops of the underlying rock and earth — known as nunataks, from the Inuit — have appeared on its surface, making their first foray into the open air for thousands of years.
With the summer ending, thoughts in this Alpine nation begin to turn to the ski season. Many resorts will grapple with an intensified set of climate-related threats to their business. Some resorts, including Corvatsch, have taken to cloaking their glacier surfaces with white tarpaulins in an effort to preserve the ice through the summer.
For some routes, like a cross-country loop at Crans-Montana that stretched out onto the Plaine Morte ice sheet, it may be too late. Google Maps still shows a ski-lift connecting the cable-car station to the glacier, but in reality, it’s no longer there.
Jeff Black
Black is an editor for Europe finance at Bloomberg News in Zurich.
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- The US is rolling out some serious subsidies to encourage greener living. Is it catching up to Europe on consumer climate incentives?
- The Netherlands has long feared climate-change-fueled floods. But now a record drought is putting a million Dutch homes at risk of collapse.
September 06
The water crisis unfolding in Jackson, Mississippi, was decades in the making: the culmination of crumbling infrastructure, systemic racism and more extreme weather. It’s also a stark warning of trouble to come as climate change piles new stress onto the services Americans rely on.
- California avoided rotating outages as officials warned that the state’s grid will face a bigger test on Tuesday amid a record heat wave.
- Switzerland’s glaciers are becoming a front-row seat to watch what climate change is doing to mountain ecosystems.
- Australia is the only OECD nation other than Russia that doesn’t have or isn’t developing fuel-efficiency standards, but that may soon change.
September 07
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| Today in Focus / The human cost of Pakistan’s devastating floods |
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| More than 1,200 people have died in the floods in Pakistan. The disaster has left around a third of the country under water |
| Jacob Rees-Mogg / Record of climate denialism indicates how business secretary will handle energy brief |
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| Beavers can be complicated neighbors. They’re wild, swimming rodents the size of basset hounds with an obsession for building dams. They will flood roads, fields and forests or fell trees without a second thought. When conflicts arise, and they probably will, you can’t talk it out. |
| Those troubles aside, beavers can provide a striking number of other benefits. And as global warming intensifies droughts, floods and wildfires, a growing number of ranchers, scientists and other “beaver believers” have come to see the creatures not only as helpers, but as furry weapons of climate resilience. |
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Europe is sacrificing its ancient forests for logging |
| When the E.U. began subsidizing wood burning over a decade ago, it was seen as a quick boost for renewable fuel. Chips and pellets were marketed as a way to turn sawdust waste into green power. But those subsidies have given rise to a booming market, to the point that wood is now Europe’s largest renewable energy source. The E.U. now consumes far more wood pellets than any other region. |
| As demand surges amid a Russian energy crunch, whole trees are being harvested for power. While European nations can count wood power toward their clean-energy targets, the E.U. scientific research agency said last year that burning wood released more carbon dioxide than would have been emitted had that energy come from fossil fuels. |
| The European Parliament will next week vote on a bill that would eliminate most of the subsidies and prohibit countries from burning whole trees to meet their clean energy targets. But with supplies of Russian oil and gas in jeopardy, some European governments are pushing hard to keep the subsidies in place. |
| A sprawling industry: E.U. official research could not identify the source of 120 million metric tons of wood used across the continent last year. |
On September 8
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The UK’s new energy minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is one of the most recognizable politicians in Britain, known for his old-fashioned double-breasted suits, an exaggerated upper-class accent and a love of archaic parliamentary traditions. He’s also an avowed supporter of fossil fuels who’s flirted with climate skepticism. Liz Truss’s decision to make Rees-Mogg secretary of state at the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has caused alarm among environmental campaigners, who question his commitment to Britain’s legally binding net zero target.
- Down Under there’s hope for more global action on greenhouse gases. Australia passed its first major climate legislation in more than a decade to set legally-binding targets to deepen emissions curbs.
- Climate change is still spreading disaster. Pakistan’s floods have caused more than $10 billion in damage. Many are now questioning who should pay for the destruction.
- Decarbonization efforts are relatively weak among Japan’s biggest carmakers, according to a study, which found companies like Toyota have been slower to respond to the shift toward zero-emission cars.
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“Finding modular systems that can work at low-costs for small capacities would significantly improve the business case,’’ said David Lluis Madrid, an analyst at BloombergNEF. “Small scale plants have been highly uneconomical with current technology.’’
Companies like Mitsubishi Heavy and Carbon Clean are racing to develop capture, storage and utilization technology, known as CCS or CCUS, as industry and countries accelerate efforts to cut emissions and meet midcentury climate targets. The Japanese government estimates the market for the sequestering, transporting and storing CO₂ will expand to nearly $70 billion a year by 2050.
Read more: Carbon Capture: The Vacuum the Climate May Depend On: QuickTake
The technology has faced scrutiny from activists who say it prolongs the life of fossil fuel facilities and generates additional risks associated with storing or transporting the captured CO₂. But researchers are already working on building direct air capture facilities that suck CO₂ directly from the atmosphere that many scientists say will be needed to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
Despite criticism, governments are increasingly looking to the technology to help meet climate targets. The US Inflation Reduction Act passed last month, which increases tax credits given for carbon captured at industrial facilities, could give a boost for such projects, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Will Hares.
Mitsubishi Heavy began developing technology to capture CO₂ from emissions more than 30 years ago and says that over the past year more than 100 firms have expressed interest in its modular capture system. The company plans to begin introducing a range of modules that can capture between 0.3 to 200 metric tons of CO₂ a day using an amine-based solution, from next year.
Exxon Mobil Corp. says its LaBarge CCS facility in Wyoming has captured more CO₂ than any other to date. The company says the site sequesters 6 to 7 million tons a year that is then pumped into wells to push out more oil and gas.
Mitsubishi Heavy declined to disclose the price of its compact CCS units. However, the cost of producing these technology is expected to decline as the system is standardized and mass-produced, particularly as opposed to larger-scale systems that are typically bespoke.
Its first installation has already taken place at a biomass-fueled power plant in Hiroshima, in southern Japan. The module is the smallest version and takes up about 10 square meters of space, and is roughly the size of a couple of vans stacked on top of each other. The model chosen by the plant’s operator, Taihei Dengyo Kaisha Ltd., captures less than 1% of carbon dioxide emitted from facility.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Engineering’s Chief Technology Officer Makoto Susaki acknowledges that an effective transition means moving away from the burning carbon-intensive fuels, but says that CCS devices will help some places in their efforts to decarbonize.
“There will be places that can’t immediately install renewable energy, and have to continue using fossil fuel” for power, he said. “In that scenario, using carbon capture is an option. It’s not the end-goal, as there should be discussion after on how to enable more renewable sources of energy.”
Shoko Oda
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The drought- and flood-stricken summer of 2022 has shown the impact of 1.1° Celsius of global warming — the amount that’s already occurred since pre-industrial times. Now a major scientific reassessment finds that several critical planetary systems are at risk of breaking beyond repair even if nations restrain warming to 1.5°C, the lower threshold stipulated by the Paris Agreement.
- Salt in the oceans may be the next big predictor of rains for crops. A Boston startup is using ocean salinity to forecast rainfall totals.
- Severe droughts, heat waves and other extreme weather events have spurred a revival of interest from investors in vertical farms.
- Companies are working to tackle food waste. One producer is flavoring its beverages with bruised fruit that would otherwise be thrown away.
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The battle for the future of Australia’s climate policy is no longer about whether to cut carbon emissions — it’s about how fast to act. On one side, pro-climate lawmakers who control the balance of power in parliament are pushing for sharper cuts and radical policies like banning new coal and gas mines. In the other camp, big business who are committed to some change but fear rapid movement will imperil an economy reliant on fossil fuel exports. Trying to balance these competing interests is Australia’s new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who won power with a pledge to end the country’s “climate wars.”
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A northeastern province that was once one of China’s major coal and industrial hubs has launched a 600 billion yuan ($87 billion) plan to expand clean energy production. Liaoning province is planning six different energy bases of 10 gigawatts each, according to state-owned CCTV. That’s enough combined generation to power all of Thailand.
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South African Environment Minister Barbara Creecy is asking affluent nations that have emitted the bulk of the world’s climate-warming gases to commit more assistance to those most affected by the impact of rising temperatures. Developing nations want this year’s talks in Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt to focus on financial assistance post-2025, she says, with a previous pledge to provide $100 billion annually to serve as a “floor.”
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